The Huggable World of Plushies

"This is Scrump.  I made her.  But her head is too big, so I pretended a bug laid eggs in her ear."
~Lilo, Lilo & Stitch

I remember the day I discovered the craft of plushie making.  I was poking around corners of www.deviantart.com that I had yet to explore and stumbled upon it.  Making your own doll was a completely new concept to me.  The idea of making a doll for a child was within my realm of reasoning, although it conjured images of Raggedy Ann dolls and things with button eyes that came just a little too close to resembling something you cast voodoo spells on.  And it seemed a bit silly to go through so much trouble when you could go to a store and by a doll that wasn’t creepy.  But here were people (lots and lots of people) who could stitch together completely adorable little dolls of just about any fictional character they wanted.  They weren’t creating Raggedy Ann for the sake of giving a toy to a little kid, they were creating cute, huggable versions of their favorite characters for the sake of owning cute huggable versions of their favorite characters.

A lightbulb came on.  I could hug anyone I wanted!  All I had to do was figure out how to make them!

It was as though I had seen the light.  Someday, I would hug the crap out of one of my favorite characters while squeeling like a little girl.  It was my destiny!



Now, I have to say I was terribly impressed with what I saw that day.  Most of these guys are hand stitched and sometimes the details are pretty impressive.  Here’s a sampling, all found on deviantart.

Captain Jack Sparrow, by BabyLondonStar

Harry Potter, by Kinky-chichi

Sora from the video game Kingdom Hearts, by momoiro_machiko

I knew I wouldn’t be able to pull off something like that at first, and aimed for something along the lines of a glorified gingerbread man.  A glorified, fanatical policeman gingerbread man, actually.  I had recently read Les Miserable by Victor Hugo and decided that Inspector Javert, a character in the novel who is, indeed, a fanatical policeman, needed a hug and I was going to give it to him.

Is he friendly?  No.  Does he need a hug?  Yes.  And maybe some ice cream.  And maybe some therapy.

I leapt right into sewing the little guy and I had no idea what I was doing, but, hey, how hard could it be?  Famous last words, right?  He was a disaster.  I worked on him off and on while on summer breaks from school, finally decided I wasn’t so much building him as trying to salvage him, and then finally gave up.

A little later I had the urge to try again and this time I did my homework first.  I successfully completed a glorified, anime gingerbread man, aka: Wolfwood from the anime Trigun.

2D Wolfwood looking kick-butt.

3D Wolfwood looking squishy.  (And... smoking, but, hey, he does it all the time in the show.)

Once I knew what I was doing, I quickly realized I could challenge myself further.  Right now, I’m finishing up a plushy of Vash, from the same anime, who’s more of a glorified teddy bear rather than a gingerbread man.  Hopefully, on my next blog post, I can show him off.  When I do, I'll talk a bit about how he was made and maybe some sewing tips and that sort of thing.

Vash approves of plushies!

 Until then, here's a link straight to the plushie section of deviantart, for anyone who wants to take a peak at more little cuties that people have made.  [Click here for cute squishy things.]